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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25184152">The First Time It Was Heard</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoneforreality/pseuds/notoneforreality'>notoneforreality</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [10]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>James Bond (Craig movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>007 Fest, 007 Fest 2020, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ballet, Ballet, Bond is dramatic, F/F, M/M, Prompt Fill, Q is sneaky, Team Q Branch, and lives for the aesthetic, choreography, composition, dancing in the dark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:47:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,776</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25184152</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/notoneforreality/pseuds/notoneforreality</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Q is leaving the theatre late at night when he hears the music in the pitch black and thinks it's a ghost. When he turns around to watch, however, there's a life presoin onstage in the darkness, with just the occasional glimpse of red ballet shoes.</p>
<p>There might not be a ghost, but the shoes haunt his dreams.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>James Bond/Q, R/Agent Bobby Carter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>QB-B3 007 Fest 2020 [10]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1795726</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The First Time It Was Heard</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for--<br/>July 10th: AU Day;<br/>This prompt from the 2018 anon list: James was a lengendary ballet dancer who had just dropped out from the public eyes. Q is a new dancer in the theater. He always wonder who is the mysterious man who was dancing when the theater is close but he never caught the face but only saw the shoes he wore;<br/>This prompt from the 2019 anon list: Use this generator to get a random Hozier lyric, then write a fic inspired by/using that lyric. Generator found here: http://generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=22501</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Over the past month, Q has come to love the empty, still, silence of the pitch-black auditorium. He sits at the back, fingers stroking along the plush of the chair’s arms, and lets himself breathe, safe in the darkness of his theatre.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This moment is one of the treasures Q has found in the Master’s Interpretive Sixth Company, when everyone has left the building besides Sam in the front office, all the lights are out, and Q feels like the only person in the world.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s a treasure only beaten by what comes next.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In the darkness, the soft tapping pad of leather soles on the boards of the stage are loud, even from this far away. What’s not so clear is the figure on the stage, just a more solid shadow moving amongst the black. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The shadow drifts across the stage, and then there’s a pause. A faint blue-tinged haze of fuzzy light blooms in the centre of the stage, lighting up a pair of hands, until it’s set on the floor of the stage and instead illuminates a pair of red canvas ballet slippers in fifth position.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q has only ever caught occasional glimpse of those red shoes, a little desaturated in the glow of a phone screen. Still, they’ve danced their way through Q’s dreams for the past several weeks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Piano notes float from the stage, tinkling and bright, and Q holds his breath, waiting for the shoes to dance out of the light. It’s an odd spectacle, one that can’t be seen, but Q watches the shadow leap and flow across the stage, hears the tap and shish of the shoes threading under and over the tinny music coming from the phone. Between that and the thrum of the music in his bones, Q is transfixed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’d found out about this by accident, in his first week at the company. During one of their breaks in rehearsal, he’d overheard that one of the set technicians was ill and they were down a pair of hands for painting the backdrop. Q couldn’t miss rehearsals, but he could offer a pair of hands when Madame Olivia finally released the dancers from her clutches. They’d been grateful for the offer, and he’d been glad to put his Art A Level to some use, staying almost until eleven at night working on a background of the ball scene. Then, on his way out through the dark auditorium, he’d heard the music.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The first time he discovered this secret dancer, Q had been half convinced it was a ghost. Most of the company thought there was a ghost, a soul haunting the stage after hours, and when he’d heard the music start on his way out, it had been faint and dreamlike, unreal. He was almost entirely alone in the building, Connie already slipped out of the stage door to secure it, and Sam waiting in the front office to lock up the theatre once Q left.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He didn’t know what he was frightened of seeing, a glowing figure somewhere hovering between the stage and the rigging? A strange puppet of a corpse performing like a compulsion? His brother would laugh at him, but Tony was never interested in anything to do with the theatre, didn’t understand the superstitions and rituals that come with the territory.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Under the sound of footsteps and music, however, was the sound of breathing.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Slowly, quietly, still half afraid of whatever, whoever was dancing in pitch black just before the theatre’s due to be locked up for the night, Q turned to watch.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Then, as now, it had been too dark then to make out anything but the red slippers whenever they stepped into the glow from the phone screen, but it had been enough to haunt Q, anyway, ghost or not. The last chord of the music hung in the air and caught in Q’s throat and he’d fled, throwing a goodbye over his shoulder to Sam on the way out into the cold night.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>No one in the company has red canvas slippers. Ameera has red satin pointe-shoes from her last show, but they weren’t what Q was looking for.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>What he’s still looking for.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He watches the slippers dance in and out of the patch of light, listens to the thread of violins layered through the piano.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One slipper lands, turned out beside the phone, and the glow of the screen just touches a thigh, where the dancer’s back leg is kneeling. The final chord rings out, and Q breathes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s always been the same music. It’s not a score Q recognises, nor in a style he recognises, although he can hear influences of various composers that he knows, but he finds himself humming it, sometimes, when he’s just going about his day. It’s as familiar to him as the rest of the theatre, now, after so many nights spent watching the shadows of its routine, although the routine is more changeable than the music, from what Q can make out.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The phone is picked up, hands briefly illuminated, and then the screen is shut off, plunging the auditorium back into darkness. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q waits to watch the shadow disappear into the wings, and then rises from his seat and heads for the lobby, for home.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next morning, Madame Olivia announces that the last show of the run, next week, shall be her last show with the company, and there’ll be a party after the performance, to celebrate her retirement. She’s been with the company for sixty years, and there had been rumours of her retirement, although she’d always seemed the type of woman to keep dancing until she dropped in the middle of shouting a barre exercise, or in the middle of demonstrating a sequence that the corps kept messing up. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Even after just over a month with the company, Q can feel the hole that will be left when she goes. Monsieur Mallory, currently tucked behind the piano in the corner of the studio, is to take her place.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The show on Madame Olivia’s last night is electric, dancers performing their best for her, proving all that she’s taught them, giving back all her stern, stone-faced love in the only way she’ll accept: technical and musical perfection on the stage. The audience love it, and Q is so excited that he grabs Ameera and swings her round, her shrieks joining with everyone else’s cries. It’s all the excitement of a last show with the added emotions of Madame Olivia’s retirement, and the wings and dressing rooms are alive with bodies and shouts and costumes flying all over the place.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q changes into his nice suit and goes to find Ameera, so they can make their way down to the party together. As they pass the doors to the auditorium, however, Q hesitates. It will be the first time he hadn’t stayed behind to watch the secret dancer, and he feels like he has to at least look in to see the space, so dark and empty compared to what it had looked like from the stage an hour ago.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He tells Ameera that he’ll catch up with her, and then pushes into the auditorium.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s not dark. There’s a spotlight on the stage, in which two people are dancing, a muted pas de deux. Q recognises Madame Olivia immediately, though he was expecting her to be at the party already, but the man isn’t quite as familiar. There’s something there, prickling at the back of Q’s mind, but his focus is drawn to the red canvas shoes, instead of the man’s face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’s the secret dancer, dancing in the light, to different music, with Madame Olivia.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The scene is tender and soft and he feels horribly like he’s intruding, so he slips back out of the auditorium and goes to join the party.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Madame Olivia turns up ten minutes after Q finds Ameera cajoling her girlfriend Bobby into doing shots, but the dancer is nowhere to be seen. Q shoves away the irrational swell of disappointment in his chest, and leans over the bar to ask for a lemonade, handing over a five pound note and tucking his change into his trouser pocket.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>While he’s waiting for his drink, another body leans over him, pressing him against the bar, and Q turns, ready to be indignant. The words catch in his throat when he recognises the face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re James Bond,” he breathes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>James Bond, the old premier danseur noble of the Master’s Interpretive Ballet, famous for both his incredible dancing and his sudden disappearance from the public eye, looks down at Q. Q can hardly breathe. He’d seen him perform live exactly three times before he retired abruptly and vanished, and that was only after wearing out the tape of his Don Quixote performance that had made Q want to become a dancer in the first place. He’s wearing a fancy silvery grey suit, with a white shirt and a blue tie, and Q feels like his own black suit looks a little worn in comparison.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I am he,” James Bond says, lips and one eyebrow quirked in amusement.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re an incredible dancer, Mr Bond,” Q says, his lemonade forgotten. “I’m Q, I’m new to the corps.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>James Bond watches Q, and then he smiles. “Call me James.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q has achieved a lot of his dreams in life, joining the Master’s Interpretive Ballet not least among them, but this feels the most surreal of all of them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Did you come to see the show tonight?” Q remembers his lemonade, and the bartender takes James’ order.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I did,” James says, once he’s paid for a martini. “I came for Olivia.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The familiarity of the tone and the lack of an honorific is so strange that, for a moment, Q doesn’t quite realise that James means </span>
  <em>
    <span>Madame </span>
  </em>
  <span>Olivia.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“She was my teacher,” James says, in answer to Q’s unasked question. “A while ago, now.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q desperately wants to ask why James left the ballet, why he disappeared, where he’s been for the past eight years, but he doesn’t. Instead, he spots Ameera and Bobby in one corner, with Sam from the office, the three of them laughing with each other, and asks if he can introduce James.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>James says yes, and then it turns out that he remembers Bobby from when she was at the school while he was still performing with the company, and she grins at him, whilst Ameera is making huge eyes at Q from behind their backs. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>After a couple of hours — when there are even more people crammed into the room, the nominal ‘dance floor’ crowded with an astounding lack of any sort of coordination, coming from a group of mostly professional dancers — Q makes a few excuses and steps out. Immediately outside the door is a group of guilty smokers, so Q goes further, wandering across the green in front of the theatre to the bench closer to the road.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He sits titled back to look up at the stars, and lets his mind wander.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I like that melody.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q startles at the sound of the voice and nearly falls off the bench. James catches him, even though Q regains his balance without help, and then steps around the bench to sit down next to him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What melody?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The one you were humming.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q hadn’t realised he was humming. He casts his mind back, but all he can come up with is the secret dancer’s music. He hums another couple of bars from it, and James’ face does something odd.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s the one,” James says. “Where did you hear that?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A flare of heat brushes across Q’s cheeks, and he fiddles with his sleeves. “Oh, just somewhere,” he says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>James stands and holds his hand out to Q, pulling him to his feet and back towards the theatre.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They go past the bar, past the auditorium, through the door to backstage, dark and deserted. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Where are we going?” Q asks, letting himself be led.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you still have your shoes?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The shoes Q’s wearing at the moment are shiny patent leather oxfords that he bought for his first press night, two years ago. He glances down at them before realising that James is talking about ballet slippers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“In the dressing room,” he says, and James pushes him in the direction of the men’s corps dressing room. Q goes, still confused about what’s happening, and pulls the black canvas shoes from his bag, taking a moment to blink at himself in the mirror baffled by the way the night has gone, before returning to the side of the stage.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Being on the stage when it’s dark is different to being at the back of the auditorium in the dark. Q knows this, is used to running on and offstage in blackout and unfailingly finding his mark before the lights come up. From the wings, he can see James in the centre of the stage, can make out the expression on his face as he beckons to Q. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At the edge of the stage is a pair of black dress shoes, and Q raises an eyebrow at James, who nods.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q changes his shoes, and then pads over to where James is waiting.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You know Olivia’s adagio?” James asks, and Q nods. James’ grin is bright, even in the darkness. “Dance with me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He shucks his jacket, and then pulls a phone out from one of the pockets, flicking through to a music application. Q’s chest does something funny, but he concentrates on taking his own jacket off, on folding it neatly, on keeping his breathing steady and his thinking sensible.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>James tosses the phone on top of his own jacket dropped haphazardly, and then runs upstage to take his place next to Q, waiting for the first notes of the allegro exercise to start.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They both flow through the exercise seamlessly. The steps are worn into Q’s muscles, last performed only this morning in warm-up, so he risks a few glances to his side and finds James keeping up effortlessly, dancing the routine as though he, too, had only performed it this morning.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q strikes his final pose. For a long moment, the two of them stay there, frozen with arms in open fourth, right foot dégagé derrière, their breaths loud and harsh in the stillness of the room. Then James drops out of it, and Q follows, shifting into a relaxed parallel.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“My favourite exercise,” James says, voice joyful, and Q’s not surprised.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He is surprised when James walks over to collect his phone and the light of it falls over red canvas slippers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh,” Q says, and James straightens up, turning around to face Q.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This close, he’s not a shadow. Q can see the amusement on his face, the softness in the lines around his eyes and mouth.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I thought someone was watching me,” James says. Q feels like he should apologise, but James is still smiling. “If I’d known it was someone as pretty as you, I might have turned on the house lights.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q feels himself heat so much that he feels sure he’s as red as James shoes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The music,” he says, “what is it?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>James steps close, the tap of his leather soles quiet beneath the roar of Q’s heart in his ears.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I finished the composition, but I’ve never been happy with the choreography.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Q is still thinking about James composing the interweaving piano and violin melody when James pulls their bodies together.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Perhaps you can help me,” James says, and Q leans into the warmth of his body. “Or perhaps,” James breathes next to his ear, “you can help me with a different type of dancing in darkness.”</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Two years later, when the Master’s Interpretive Ballet is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary, James Bond returns from the dead to the world of ballet for one last performance. It’s his own choreography to his own composition: a pas de deux with his husband, premier danseur Peter Q. Reed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Onstage, the two men dance as though they are two halves of a whole, a being of love and music, and the melody is just as much of a dream as the first time Q heard it, floating through the darkness of an almost empty theatre.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When they finish, the auditorium — full, and almost visible beyond the bright beam of the stage lights — erupts into applause, and it’s the opposite of that first night, but Q beams, his husband a solid presence at his side, and bows low enough to see his slippers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Red canvas, to match his husband’s.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Keep notes:<br/>--another fic in which I completely forget about the canon gang in favour of my OCs like literally Tanner and Moneypenny did not even occur to me until I was transferring this whole thing to ao3<br/>--in which we pretend that lit fire exit signs don't exist because it ruins the aesthetic and also because I only remembered them halfway through<br/>--wow hot DAMN Bond's last line is cringey as hell I really do apologise I've never tried to write anything even remotely sexy before<br/>--are Bond's shoes just red because the Red Shoes is what made me want to be a ballet dancer? yes. please stop asking questions about my mental wellbeing I am aware of the ending to that story<br/>--the fic gets a coda because ballet gets a coda<br/>--in which I give Bond and Q their own Wangxian bc I am currently obsessed with mdzs/cql/the untamed and I love my magic chinese husbands just as much as my british secret service bfs</p></blockquote></div></div>
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